How to make a true crime drama in five easy steps

Andy Kinnear and Céin McGillicuddy are the creators of BBC3's new true-crime spoof Sexy Murder, about American documentary filmmaker Christoph Spinetti as he attempts to make his very own Making a Murderer or The Jinx. But sexier. They sat down with Spinetti in an exclusive interview for i.

Creating and writing 'Top Coppers'

If you've seen Top Coppers on BBC Two recently, then you might be forgiven for thinking you had slipped into some kind of weird retro TV dream that looked like the 70s but had endless 90s references, with characters seemingly from all of the world, yet they live in a completely made-up place. And there's a hamster on a zipline. Co-creators and writers Andy Kinnear and Céin McGillicuddy are to blame for that.

Pleasant surprise of the week came in the form of BBC Three comedy Top Coppers which I thought would be another awful offering to match the woeful Crims. Instead this loving pastiche of 1970s and 1980s cop shows offered some big belly laughs and some wonderful observational gags on top. Writers Andy Kinnear and Cein McGillicuddy have employed a high gag ratio but at the same time haven't forsaken the plot of the episode over getting cheap laughs. Meanwhile the cast seemingly realise that the best way to pull off a successful spoof is to play it dead straight and that's what most of them have done. Top Coppers is centred round the Justice City Police Department and more specifically Detectives John Mahogany and Mitch Rust (Steen Raskopoulos and John Kearns). Mahogany and Rust have a strong bond which looks to be tested when the former wants to go out with the new girl in the office rather than enjoy movie night with his colleague. This decision leads Rust to go to some extreme lengths to compensate for his loss which includes trying to recreate certain scenes from the movie Speed. The best recurring gag in the first episode for me involved the fact that gangster Harry McCrane (Paul Ritter) had recently purchased an ice cream factory meaning that the employees now had to produce both ice cream and drugs. Although at times Top Coppers may have been a little silly, I felt that it was one of the more tightly-plotted TV comedies that I've recently seen. More than anything Top Coppers was just very funny and that's more than I can say for most of the British sitcoms I've watched during 2015. I'm just hoping that the enjoyment that I garnered from the opening instalment wasn't a one-off and that Top Coppers will go down as one of my favourite comedies of the year.

How Top Coppers was written

As co-creators of new BBC Three comedy Top Coppers, Cein McGillicuddy and Andy Kinnear have spent the best part of a decade developing the fictional Justice City Police Department and it's two flame-haired cops, John Mahogany and Mitch Rust. As the series kicks off, the pair explain the show's back story and the many, many film and TV references you can expect to see in it.